Now, of course copyright owners of “free” resources have the right to set the terms of access. They can put up a datawall that demands the exchange of personal information (and thus enables data tracking, reporting, and maybe even aggregation with other datasets) for the otherwise free article. I wonder how far we will see this extend.
Robert Harington argues that academic societies need to balance mission and business more effectively. There is nothing wrong with developing a mixed publishing economy that best suits a range of communities and types of business.
Plan S proposes to take a hammer to how we fund peer review and publication. The focus is currently on APCs, but submission fees are overall cheaper for authors, particularly at highly selective journals, and thus warrant serious consideration.
Thus the defining property of traditional publishing is editorial selection. That is what publishing is about.
Perhaps the academy has not taken control of scholarly publishing because it doesn’t want to.
The read-and-publish business model has been introduced to the U.S. by MIT and the Royal Society of Chemistry. It has implications for publishers, however, that must be studied carefully.
Libraries and legacy publishers are in an unholy embrace. They need not love each other to feel they should stick together.
Robert Harington addresses openness, and the widening divisions in the “Two Cultures” — which C. P. Snow would likely be appalled to find are as apparent as they ever were.
In 1940, the AAUP published a Statement on Academic Freedom. In 2018, it’s time for it to be updated–and some items clarified.
Organizations launching open access journals have many choices to make. What are their technology options?
It often seems that it is taken for granted that open access will accelerate scientific discovery, but how would we evaluate this? Do we even know that it is true?
2017 may have been a watershed year for the Internet and its future. What did we learn? And what factors may shape 2018?
Robert Harington interviews James Milne, Chair of the newly formed Coalition for Responsible Sharing, on action being taken against ResearchGate.
Scholarly publishers are already doing much to make government funded research as free as possible as soon as it is published. Why do we need a law to enact what is already taking shape? Robert Harington suggests it comes down to politics.
PubMed is found to contain predatory journals and publishers, likely reflecting a long-term and broader problem, which only adds to the confusion about what exactly PubMed represents at this point.